And like all in-between phenomena, it’s a bit mixed. From the point of view of a simple ethnography, the mixing is delightful. It ranges from the present international context, across Gregory’s and other’s fieldwork data among Bastar planters and Marwaris merchants throughout India, with comparisons to Europe thrown in, to, in Chapter VII, « Domesticated Money », a foray into cowry shell trade. This chapter, which prefaces Chapter VIII’s analysis of the US dropping its gold standard, dips into the changing history of the shell trade that tied the Indian Ocean to West Africa and India [7], and successive hegemonic attempts to impose standards of value as « struggles for prestige » (p. 298).

With some of this ethnography Gregory is not only elegant but also appropriately jolting. Let us start with the resonating title :

(p. 1)

« Savage » here does not refer to the wild, concrete, yet geometrical thoughts that entreated us nearly 40 years ago ; in fact, to the opposite, as mathematical manipulations, as much if not more than new production of wealth, increasingly, it seems, define our epoch’s pursuit of exchange value [8]. There are curious allusions – in spite of the title, unintended I believe – between that book and this book’s discourse on logic. In any case, the sequel to Gifts and Commodities, with all the noise that book created, does not start off modestly defending earlier assertions. It locates us in an ethnographic, historical, setting. One does not have to agree with Gregory’s histories, his reading of the present, or his criticism of others’ attempts to appropriate anthropological terms for the analysis of the present – e.g. on Marcus’ analysis of the Hunts brothers controlling the silver market (pp. 284-286) – to consent that what he is trying to do is very, very important. At the London School of Economics’ Department of Anthropology seminar [9] celebrating Raymond Firth’s 100th birthday, faculty dutifully read to Firth passages from his books. The selections described his life-long efforts to render intelligible other ways of living. Firth responded by telling the assembled that anthropology had to do a better job describing our own life before that task was completely appropriated by economists. As much as it slips into ethnographic data on India, Savage Money is a sustained, welcomed, attempt to do just that.

Yet this book is hardly an ethnography of « contemporary » India or the contemporary world system. Rather, like his first book, it constructs a number of analytical arguments, and struggles to generate a terminology hovering between secondary and tertiary analysis. For Gregory’s gift is that of being a social theorist of the argumentative type [10]. The data adduced is here illustrative rather than convincing. Yet as the ethnography is a bit mixed so are the theoretical gambits cleverly strewn throughout the text. The first chapter locates the key analytical issue with respect to the word « value », and the power of social relations to define what is valued. Gregory contrasts « class consciousness » that he claims generates value for Marxists with the « individual cognition » contemporary economists use, and both with the practice of « reciprocal recognition » that he thinks should undergird the humanist anthropologist. Peculiarly, Gregory’s understanding of « value » is more in keeping with Talcott Parsons than Marx [11] (who knew the difference between bees and architects). The last chapter strings together the logic of the poet John Milton, Ranajit Guha, the ostensive father of the Indian subaltern group and Lévi-Strauss to argue for a « radical humanist anthropology ». The earlier chapters locate the ethnography of the present and some of anthropology’s current theoretical arguments in the aforementioned « beginnings of disorganized capitalism » while later chapters return to some contemporary US cultural anthropology. Gregory suggests that its understanding of culture goes along with, is almost a superstructural counterpart to, contemporary social relations ; and as a subaltern, he is going to question it, not unlike his Bastar folk who do not accept all of the Brahmanical valuations they are asked to accept [12]. Chapter II, « Beyond Gifts and Commodities », is a persuasive defense of his earlier work against representative critics, Appadurai [13] and Parry [14]. Gregory’s writing is brilliant and commanding, especially when he acts the part of a logician (e.g. pp. 46-48). But he both gives and takes : the same chapter also attempts to set out, using Raheja [15] and Parry’s work on dan [16], a new line of thought. He steps over the historicized understanding of « goods » he provided in Gifts and Commodities and, in ways not entirely inconsistent with Weiner’s Inalienable Possessions [17], and Godelier’s subsequent The Enigma of the Gift [18], generates a new set of distinctions among gifts, goods, and commodities. It is important to note that these categories now become virtual mythemes – perhaps more accurately, functions – pre-existing forms taking particular slots in different social places or times. « Commodities » are not the dominant category of wealth produced in a particular kind of society, a « special ether which determines the specific weight of everything that appears in it » [19]. In any case, Chapter II thus charts the course of the book as Gregory argues for looking at these items as they are produced and exchanged among houses, in the market and the State (the latter single rather than plural).

In the space remaining here I chart out more carefully what Gregory thinks he is doing on a theoretical level. I am being selective. There is a lot in this book. While it has the structure of a coherent work, it also shows to be a stitching together of articles (e.g. « paper » ; p. 236) written over time and for somewhat different purposes. And one can pull some of its nuggets out of their context for purposes removed from Gregory’s own. This, rather than internal consistency, of course, is the mark of our useful thinkers.

Following my attempt to lay out his key theoretical argument, I briefly close on a matter of ethnography versus theory that, in a useful way, plagues books like this one.

One final orienting point : perhaps a bit figuratively, much of the importance of Gifts and Commodities stemmed from Gregory sitting at Godelier’s feet. More literally, this book is generated from sitting at Guha’s side [20]. He is still there, and he is still assembling his ethnography of India. Gifts and Commodities was the work of a gifted novice, one whose insights were not occluded by a primary encounter with the complexity of social life, and so perhaps is best considered done. By contrast, Savage Money is a progress report, and remains incomplete. Although much of this book illustrates Gregory’s commendable capacity to render quantitative data and charts and diagrams into qualitative descriptions of his ideas about social systems, these scenarios are now and again broken by promising ethnographic descriptions, encounters with (Bastar and other) instructors and analyses of practices and myths. One great one is in Chapter VII « Domesticated Money » in which an imaginative rendering of a Benin myth about the origin of cowry and French money is turned into a « quality theory of money » counter posed to Friedman’s « quantity theory of money ». Analyses like this, if still a bit incipient, are full of promise.

Gregory opposes two kinds of understandings, those he thinks existed, in the West, largely before the epoch of the present (from the 16th and 17th century on), defined here in terms of Milton’s understanding of « commonplace logic », and axiomatic logic. The former, which he is trying to follow, is a contextual logic, dependent upon time and place, and so constantly subject to review ; the latter is supposedly universal, so Cartesian, and independent of every subject. In virtually every chapter in this book Gregory is trying to show how different sets of valuations co-exist, and thus the inappropriateness of axiomatic logic for the analysis of social life. He suggests that Western social theorists from at least Marx on have erred following too closely the Cartesian model. Following on Fabian’s work [21], he argues that when we come upon these discrepant systems we disassociate them by seeing different values as products of evolution, that is of being from different times. One astonishing quote from Hobsbawm (p. 21) illustrates the foolishness of such reasoning (although just as naively Gregory assumes Hobsbawm’s perspective follows automatically from a labor theory of value derived from the analytical scope of « class consciousness »). In any case, as Marx incorrectly asserts that the values of the factory worker are the only ones in the West (e.g. p. 25), Dumont asserts India is dominated by Brahmanical values, or the West is dominated by Individualism. Time sequences explain contrary evidence, and thus devalue internal diversity, commonplace logic, and the contradictions that emanate from them. These writers, at least, have some idea of social realities in which they locate what Gregory sees as the value question. He also deals with the dominant economic voice today, Milton Friedman’s, and the general predilection to derive the analogue of value in economics from individual cognition, which, of course, makes social context irrelevant since if it exists it is a product of individual preference.

Not wishing to question either his reading of Marx or Dumont – as theoreticians or ethnographers ? – it is against this devaluation that Gregory stands – a worthy and not exactly novel anthropological undertaking. Yet in emphasizing diversity within these spaces, what happens to it across spaces ? After a long exegesis of Dumont’s thinking (pp. 23-27), which is not sensitive to the historical footing of Dumont’s thought on India and especially the West [22], and a moving, but not entirely germane recounting of Veena Das’s analysis of suffering in state and family structures of conflict (pp. 27-33), Gregory consents to the « unique » Brahmanic values of India. But he then goes on to suggest that its values in the market and farm are minor variations of those found in « Asia, Africa, Latin America and even Europe » (p. 34) [23]. It is not surprising that this project is launched by asserting that anthropology’s starting point has to be from unity, not diversity (p. 4). And, perhaps it should be said, therefore exchange forms Marx inscribed in Capital, independent of Marx’s careful – for his time– analysis of them as historically specific forms, become the organizing feature of the book. Yet everywhere Gregory distinguishes between the workings of this form, and some other. So it is not clear how one can, or ought, to start with the idea of unity.

Perhaps discussions of the idea of value, independent of specific productive purposes and cycles, are bound to be murky, ultimately unsatisfactory, and at best just odd-job tools.

The progress in this book is the attempt to show how different exchange forms weave around the different institutions of the house, Gregory thinks the market (does the existence of market places in India allow one to talk about « the market » in India ?), and the state, all of which are going to define differentially what is value. The idea of the house, derived from Rodgers [24], and of course Lévi-Strauss, consists of a corporate body owning an estate of land, various livestock, names, religious powers, etc. (p. 13). Independent of any specific forms or analyses, « commodities are those values that arise as things pass from Houses to Market […] gifts are those values that pass between Houses, and goods the inalienable keepsakes that are stored within a single House » (ibid.). « House relics », notes Rodgers, « are crucial in this type of culture for they condense a great deal of feeling about the family’s ancestry, social position, and future prospects into an observable and subjectively quite beautiful form » (quoted in ibid). Working off of Raheja and Parry’s material reviewed in chapter II, this analysis of goods is extended in chapter three through a discussion of Weiner’s Inalienable Possessions. Gregory turns Weiner’s Inalienable Possessions into his goods, and ultimately land as the supreme good.

This argument is clever, and deserves attention, respect, and criticism.

Gregory gives content to the category of goods by means of the apparent embarrassment to the theory of reciprocity and contradiction of Dumont’s purity/pollution thesis that Parry and Raheja’s 1980s data showed with respect to dan. The problem for the theory of reciprocity was that receivers of dan appear not to have to give back the same stuff, and also tended to turn the gifts into commodities for their own benefit. So the relationship is asymmetric in the first case, and apparently the product of different values in the second. With regard to Dumont, bad stuff is going up, which seems to violate the purity/pollution dichotomy around which he formed his version of Indian hierarchy.

Drawing on Guha’s work again, Gregory immediately adds to this situation how these dynamics are inverted in low status situations (p. 68). I believe this is the problem of transitive and intransitive orders that Lévi-Strauss addressed years ago. In any case, out of this Gregory raises « the general question of the transfer of bads, the generic word [he uses] to describe the transfer of impurities, inauspiciousness, sin, and the like » (p. 69). In one of the fascinating ethnographic examples sprinkled through the text, Gregory notes that in Bastar district bads are exorcized from villages by ritually throwing them north, progressively so his informants tell him until they reach a mountain pass, Keshkal ghat, whence they are dumped over a cliff (ibid.). Towards the end of the next chapter Gregory recounts a concrete example of this practice, involving Naxalite activity, nicely involving a discrepancy in values, and ritual action (p. 114).

Out of this ethnographic discussion of bads Gregory deduces the analytical opposite, goods, and thence fascinating discussion of Chapter III, « Land as the Supreme Good ». What Gregory is doing here is giving a comparative, historical and to some extent sociological content to the idea of the House, as he outlined it above. He tries to show how land, as both productive resource and material repository of sentiments of the estate, becomes valued as a scarce entity, which is something that is not given away. Guardians’ ability to maintain this quality becomes, of course, a political condition even if enshrined in various forms of the sacred. He correctly points out that this is an issue of « political theology » (p. 85). Strewn through this chapter is the idea that England developed the first forms of capitalist agriculture, and Gregory edges towards an explanation of just how this could be. Keeping some things out of circulation as commodities, making them elite goods instead, facilitates the generation of commodity production and exchange. In Gregory’s terms, this tying of goods and commodities is not a historical paradox, but in fact the condition of a social system. Somehow the English elite’s ability to guarantee their status in restricted land goes along with their development of 18th century capitalism. While in some respects this problem is more directly addressed by Godelier’s recent work, Gregory’s solution is to attach the condition to a Sraffian version of Marx’s simple circulation, C-M-C’. Hence Chapter IV’s the « Production of Commodities by Means of Goods ». Using Sraffa to suggest how different domains are coupled, or function in a complementary fashion, is intriguing, and perhaps suggests more than what Gregory has yet been able to do with it – too often for my liking the « suppose » of the economist intervenes in place of ethnographic analysis. Whatever the case, one consequence of this chapter seems to be that petty commodity production remains petty, and needs outside merchants for transformation : hence the following chapters building territoriality and temporality as values in certain interests in the social collection that is Bastar, in India, and in the world. Some of this is engaging reading, but it remains, to me at least, a pouring of primary data into ostensive social, not theoretical, forms culled from elsewhere instead of an analysis of internal relations in the data in hand.

Here we come to a knotty problem about ethnography and theory. And with this we can go back to dan, and problems in theory and ethnography that runs through this stimulating study.

Gregory thinks that values are invisible threads tying people and things together, and he has to invent a category « good » out of the ethnographic fact of bads. But I think both these strategies are misconceived. Values are visible. Many of the qualities we might wish to call values are formalized aspects of cultural systems. You just have to know how to read them. One of the problems with the recent literature on India is that some of our leading theorists have not read what their informants were saying. Take Raheja for example. Here she quotes an informant and then translates :

(p. 107)

In two places, thus, when her informant says « pun-dan », Raheja writes just dan. What of the pun ? This is hardly an obscure category in Indic thought [25], though a supposed violation of both Mauss and Dumont is predicated on ignoring it. In The Gift of a Virgin Lina Fruzetti writes, « The greatest gift a man can bestow, the one from which he acquires the most merit (punya), is the gift of his daughter in marriage » (p. 17) [26]. In other words, as dan goes in one direction, pun goes in the other. The relationship is asymmetric, and the highly valued merit comes back for the dan. One might wish to suggest that something akin to the rank order Dumont outlines is a condition for the existence of this flow of values. That this is a political theology goes without saying. In any case, until these kinds of facts/relationships are appropriately ordered making up ideas about bads and goods, and likewise, using categories Marx generated for describing the capitalist mode of production, seem unwarranted. Otherwise we are turning ethnographic accounts into theoretical axioms.

In Savage Money Gregory has given us a work worthy of respect and debate. I would not like to contest the obvious fact that commodity production, and the contradictory social forms in which is it encased, now dominate the world. But this does not mean they account for the other forms that still find their way in this still complex world. To suggest otherwise is ahistorical, among other sins. I would like to suggest that Gregory has given in too much to his critics by turning to the categories of gifts, goods and commodities in this work. While anthropology has much to contribute to the analysis of the dominant forms of sociality today, its attempt to witness and describe the successful, and unsuccessful, human creations of other places and times must not be diminished. Confusing the confessional-like nature of theory with ethnography is, sometimes, to do just that.